You can swear by the U.S. News & World Report's rankings of colleges and graduate schools, or you can (as many academics do) swear at them.

But students take them seriously enough that more than 100 law students showed up at an April 7 faculty meeting to confront Houston Law Center Dean Nancy Rapoport over the school's slip to 70th in the magazine's most recent rankings.

It was an ugly meeting. Many of the students were dissatisfied with Rapoport's responses, and some faculty members criticized her harshly. At one point she became so emotional that a colleague handed her a handkerchief.

'Public and private attacks'

I'm glad I wasn't there. With four sisters and two daughters, I'm immune to feminine tears. But I melt when a lawyer cries.

In a lengthy letter to faculty and students three days later, Rapoport more than hinted that criticism over the rankings was just the latest skirmish in an old war.

"The emotions that I displayed at Friday's faculty meeting were certainly borne of frustration, not with the repeated public and private attacks on me (which comes with the territory of being the dean), but with the way that some in our community seem to prefer destructive criticism to productive suggestions or actions," she said.

Monday, a week after she wrote that letter, she apparently decided she was war-weary. She resigned.

'A fraud upon the public'

I don't know which side God is on in this war, whether Rapoport has been an effective dean or whether some mossback tenured professors unfairly undercut her.

But the controversy, with the U.S. News ranking as a flash point, says something about the University of Houston Law Center and the university itself.

Brian Leiter holds the Joseph Jamail Centennial Chair at the University of Texas School of Law, which is ranked a respectable 16th by U.S. News, right above the University of Southern California. Just like in the Rose Bowl.

Leiter is not mollified.

"U.S. News rankings are a fraud upon the public," he says.

Leiter is well-known nationally in law school circles for, among other things, doing his own data-based rankings every other year. His rankings are cut off at 40, and UT is the only Texas law school that makes the cut.

Still, he believes he knows enough about the UH's law school to think that it is the second-best in Texas, not fourth behind UT, Southern Methodist and Baylor as U.S. News has it.

"As a law professor, the first thing I think about is what notable legal scholars are on the faculty," he said. "There is no comparison between Houston and Baylor. We (at UT Law School) often find ourselves thinking about faculty at Houston as possible recruitment targets. We've never, in my 12 years here, looked at Baylor."

He said the faculty at SMU is better than Baylor's but not as strong as Houston's. (In fairness, Baylor markets itself as a school focused more on teaching practical skills than on research and scholarship. Last year, it had the highest bar passage rate in the state.)

It would surprise many around the country that U.S. News' data supports Leiter's perception. The magazine polls the dean and three faculty members at every law school. In that poll, Houston ranks slightly above SMU and well above Baylor. This counts for 25 percent of the U.S. News rankings.

But the magazine also polls more than 1,000 lawyers and judges for 15 percent of its rankings. In that poll, Houston scores miserably, well behind SMU and Baylor.

The school, with a relatively small endowment and state budget cuts, also is dragged down by resource issues such as student/faculty ratio.

But the single biggest negative factor is the low scores nationally among lawyers and judges.

Leiter suspects that the sample is skewed to the coasts, something a former U.S. News editor I spoke with denied. I think many lawyers may simply not know the school, but have an image of Houston that does not project an excellent law school.

There is a box for "don't know," but few lawyers I know would be comfortable checking that box.

The former U.S. News editor, who defended the rankings as helpful to students, himself expressed surprise.

"I would never think of Houston as being No. 2 in Texas by peer rankings," he said.

Personally, I don't care much about what they think on the East Coast. But then, I'm not a law school dean, or a law student worried about getting a job to pay off his substantial student loans.